


the most beautiful thing in the world

by breakfastoversugar



Category: Falsettos - Lapine/Finn
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Jason-centric, but they are there, its act 1 and directly after it in jasons eyes, the whizzvin and trindel arent the focus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-13 06:55:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29149323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breakfastoversugar/pseuds/breakfastoversugar
Summary: It’s easy to provoke his parents. He does it when he needs to, but most of the time it just makes him feel empty inside. He hates walking on eggshells, but hates the feeling he gets when he shatters them. It’s a lose-lose situation. He’s been dealt a failed hand in the game of cards. His king is in check.
Relationships: Jason & Marvin (Falsettos), Trina/Mendel Weisenbachfeld, Whizzer Brown/Marvin
Comments: 12
Kudos: 24





	the most beautiful thing in the world

**Author's Note:**

> jason character studies are actually my favorite thing to write in falsettos sorry literally every other character but jason wins

Jason hates walking on eggshells. 

It’s never been his style. Jason has always been blunt, angry, ready to fight, for an argument. But that was only when it was his fight. He only picked a fight when he had a dog to bare its teeth for or a leg to stand on. 

This wasn’t Jason’s fight. Truth be told, he doesn’t even quite know what’s wrong in the first place. There have been whispers lately. Something new that his father did wrong, something irrevocable and unchangeable. The normal dead-eyed and vacant stare his father gives most of the time has been replaced by guilt and pity. His mother just looks like she’s on the verge of breaking, like someone picked up one of his grandmother’s old porcelain dolls and dropped it onto the ground. 

When Jason gets home, he occasionally hears the abrupt end of an argument. Then his mother pops her head around the corner and gives him a fake smile made of sugar and lemons. “Jason, sweetie!” She chirps, grabbing his face with both of her hands and pressing gentle kisses to his cheeks, “How was school today?”

“Fine,” Jason grumbles and moves to wipe the kisses off of his cheeks because he’s 10 and that is what 10 year olds do. He doesn’t see the way the simple action knocks the wind out of his mother’s sails. As if the simple action physically twists a knife in her chest. 

His father is next. He watches them, carefully distanced at the edge of the room. He gives a small, tired smile. And it’s weird. He seems better, less depressed but still just as explosive. Jason just fixes him a look. “What was the argument about today?” He asks, just to see the smile disappear off of his father’s face. 

“Jason, why,” His father cuts himself off. He’s trying to find the words to say, floundering in a failed attempt at connection. Jason prefers it than him silently watching the hollowed shell and mockery of a real family connection. “It was nothing,” He settles on, shoots a glance at his mother, “Nothing that we can tell you now.”

“You want to tell him?” His mother gasps, incredulous and hurt. 

His dad runs a hand down his face, “We have to tell him eventually, Trina. The kids not dumb,” He motions to Jason.

Jason turns to face his mother. Her face is twisted like she ate a sour candy. Her hands are wrung together and they’re folding over themselves continuously. “But, he’s, Marvin,” She stresses his name, “He won’t  _ understand. _ Any of it.”

“He’s smart,” His father says again, “I’m sure once he meets Whizzer then-”

“He’s not going to meet  _ Whizzer.”  _ His mother hisses with venom in her voice. 

And Jason slips away from the scene. It’s easy to provoke his parents. He does it when he needs to, but most of the time it just makes him feel empty inside. He hates walking on eggshells, but hates the feeling he gets when he shatters them. It’s a lose-lose situation. He’s been dealt a failed hand in the game of cards. His king is in check. 

It’s just life every other night. There’s nothing special about today’s fight. There was nothing special about any of their fights. It was just another night, like every single other one. He eats dinner alone, plays chess alone, sits alone in the dark and puts on his newly released walkman and blocks out the noise. 

Maybe it’s his fault. He toys with the idea a lot. If he wasn’t born, then his parents wouldn’t be strung together the way they are. When Jason was younger, his mother described his birth as a miracle for two young people in love. They were better at acting back then. Jason has realized, in his ten years of life, that the situation was nothing like that. Jason was an accident, and they got married because of it. They would have been better off without him around. He wasn’t the one who made them start dating and have a child, though, so he doesn’t try to blame himself for it.

Jason plays a game with the music coming through his walkman, how loud does it have to be in order to drown out the sound of his parents fighting downstairs. The answer is not loud enough. To distract himself, he plays a game with light, watching it bounce and reflect across the different surfaces in his room. He stares at it illuminating one fallen queen chess piece on his board and tries not to think of the irony.

His parents have been like this for years. His father was closed off or simply just absent. His mother was so tired and trying to hold on to the image of the perfect family. There were always hushed arguments and plastered smiles and Jason was just tired, tired, tired. He wishes they could all just move on with their lives. 

His father does just that, in the end. He finds  _ Whizzer, _ the man that his mother was absolutely terrified of Jason meeting. When he learned exactly who Whizzer was in relation to his father, he didn’t really understand. He liked Whizzer, enjoyed the man’s presence. He has the same interests as Jason and actually seems like he listens when he talks. Jason originally was mad at his father for taking his friend away. He was scared his father was going to make his friend as unhappy as he made Jason’s mother. 

Whizzer didn’t break the cycle of unhappiness radiating off of all of them. Jason saw it with his own eyes. Despite their best efforts to give smarmy, sharp, tight smiles to each other whenever he was around, Jason could see, feel the disdain all three of them had for each other. How, in spite of his father and Whizzer’s … entanglement, they seemed like they were always on the verge of a fight. How his mother would watch his estranged father look happy for the first time in a decade and seeth with unconcealable jealously and rage. How his mother looks at Whizzer and knows he has everything she needs but nothing she wants. How Whizzer looks at his mother and knows she has everything he wants but nothing he needs. 

Jason hopes this isn’t love. His father tells him love is the most beautiful thing in the world, but if this is love - all the messy entanglement of feeling and hate and pain - Jason doesn’t ever want to fall in love at all. There’s nothing  _ beautiful _ about it. It just makes him sad. Jason doesn’t know, he doesn’t have much experience with love, but he doesn’t think it’s supposed to make you sad. Love is supposed to make you happy. The kind of butterflies in your stomach happy, the kind where you can smile for days because you’re in love and loved in return. That’s what the televisions say. 

Then again, Jason doesn’t see a life like his on television. He doesn’t see himself reflected in the characters of whatever charming, handsome boy of the month is. There is no other quiet, angry Jewish boy with gay fathers and sad mothers around for him to relate to. It’s isolating, but Jason’s no stranger to being othered. Not in school, where he sits alone and flips a chess board to play against himself. Not at home, where’s he is treated like he’s stupid and fragile and  _ broken _ by his mother. Not whenever he sees his father, because he’s always been too far away for Jason to really communicate with. Even when they’re standing right next to each other, they are so far away. 

Jason listens to his mother sobbing as his parents argue over the right path for their family. Within the quietness of his room, Jason wonders if Whizzer is downstairs. His father’s lover does have a tendency to just crop up at unexpected times. Jason doesn’t want to listen hard enough to find out, though.

Jason hates walking on eggshells. 

Wrong moves can send anyone in his family spiraling. His mother’s current pet project when it comes to him is making him see a psychiatrist. It’s probably an attempt to mold the fragments of her broken family into something presentable to the public. Before this she had been pushing harder than usual for him to stop playing chess alone, to talk to others and make friends. How could he make friends with those other kids if there was no way they could understand him and his experiences? 

He talks to Mr. Mendel some about that, about the problems he has relating to others around him. He tells him the problems he has about relating too much to his father. Jason doesn’t walk on eggshells with Mr. Mendel. He doesn’t really feel like he has too. Sometimes, when Jason says something that would usually make the light die in his parent’s eyes, Mr. Mendel’s brighten. Jason is asked to elaborate on his thoughts and it feels good to get all the thoughts off his chest. He rambles and rants and complains and bitches and he feels good afterwards. He’s genuinely feeling better with the help of Mr. Mendel. 

Love, to Jason, is still strained and fragile and flimsy. Mr. Mendel only proves that to him further. He watches, dispassionate and bored as Mr. Mendel gives his mother flustered little looks. He watches as it clicks in his mother’s head that Mr. Mendel could be her ticket to finally, finally having a normal life. It’s not love as much as it is normalcy for his mother. When she accepts his spur of the moment marriage proposal, it’s not out of love originally. Jason watches it slowly morph into that, though, as they plan and prepare. 

It almost gives him hope, watching them smile at each other. He doesn’t know if he’s seen his mother that happy in a while. Some days she doesn’t even seem like the same woman. She smiles, now, laughs and jokes and is just so much less stressed. Mr. Mendel and his mother give him hope that maybe love could be beautiful, maybe it could be something Jason could invest himself in. 

His father ruins that, eventually, like he does with most things. He comes through like a hurricane. Angry and vexed and frightening. The argument almost happens in slow motion. It’s in front of Jason this time, and everyone is there. He watches as Whizzer asks for his father to take him back. He watches his friend’s expression crumble when his father not only tells him no, but tells him that he could be more desirable than his former lover even knows. He watches his mother explain to his father that she’s in love, really in love, for the first time. He watches his father as the man gets angrier and angrier and angrier. 

Jason doesn’t like remembering that night. It leaves him feeling empty and scared and dumb. That, Jason knows, is what love is. He loves his dad. He feels so hurt and betrayed because he loves him. Jason doesn’t particularly think they’re anything beautiful about that. 

But, as he watches his father apologize and pick up the pieces of his life he had shattered on his own, it dawns on him that love is complicated and blind and yes, unkind, but steadfast. His mother and Mr. Mendel stay by his side as he tries to better himself. They do that despite how he’s wronged them, how much he has hurt them. Jason realizes he stays by his father’s side for the same reason.

Their little patchwork scraps of their family try their best to right themselves. Jason doesn’t feel like he has to walk on eggshells as much anymore. Mostly, he avoids the topic of Whizzer with his father, even though Jason still has steady contact with his father’s former lover. Things are better now, though. They’re happier together. 

Despite the fighting and the unhappiness and the problems and their struggles, they are a family. A tight-knit family that really, honestly, loves each other. And maybe, just maybe, that really is beautiful. 

**Author's Note:**

> this started out as a light vent for some rlly old ass trauma but it evolved into just a jason fic. hes so smart what an amazing kid


End file.
